> The unnamed pair were both victims of crime, although one had been a suspect was well

I'm glad to hear about their good state of health!

Ah good. It's not just me enjoying the irony of so many mistakes, in an article about cops making many mistakes.

Page tab title now corrected from "Police wrapped" to "Police rapped".

Personally, I would support the ICO having the power to encase in clingfilm as a punishment.

Back in the day (24 years ago? really? blink and you miss it), in another life, I found it extremely odd that the local force system (and probably the PNC on which it was modelled) was set up assuming that no two "customers" would have the same name and DoB (That's what ID cards are for lol)... there were provisons for the occurrance, of course, but they weren't immediately obvious. I did ask a question but got a shrug from the Inspector.

So, in this case, once the mess started I doubt there was much the force could do to sort it out becasue officers/staff would be querying the data, getting whichever "customer" was first, and, assuming that the computer was giving them the right "customer", modifying the record accordingly and consequently screwing up the data leading to much unpleasantness all round.

To compound the issue, IIRC the UI didn't allow an officer to correct the mistake, even if they had noticed the snfu, (24x7) so the data manager (0900-1700 Monday - Friday if you were lucky) would have to have knowledge of the records concerned and not make a mistake when unpicking the mess.

In same early 2000s era I was building a data deduplication system for banks to deal with OFAC and all the terrorists under the bed hysteria after 9/11.

Demonstrating it to the MET we were shown their in-house system that had a bunch of DB scripts to automatically match Alistair=Alisdair=Al=Ali

Great for matching 60s E London gangsters, not so great against Al-Qaeda, or Alistair-Qaeda to the boys in blue.

...anyone recognises a possible repeat of this anywhere in the UK's labyrinthine public sector IT estate

https://ccea.org.uk/regulation/guidance/unique-learner-number

When I try to see anything on ccea.org.uk I am blocked. I live in Canada. What is ccea hiding?

Oh, they don't like US either (just checked using my sdf.org shell account and links)!

I have absolutely no idea why they do that. Try

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-access-your-personal-learning-record

The actual UK government Web page for students about the personal learning record that uses the ULN as the key.

Yes. I'm sure that is quite reassuring for the people who do become victims of such errors.

They undoubtedly console themselves by thinking how absolutely infrequent such errors are.

Especially when the error is brought to light, and police forces continue to confuse them for months afterwards.

I went to Boots opticians for an eye test, having not used them for a number of years. Surprisingly they found my record on their computer system from only a couple of years earlier. I was somewhat baffled, but the optician proceeded to test my sight based on "my" previous visit. I couldn't even read the first big letter at the top of the chart. I said there must be a mistake somewhere. He checked my address on their system and it was my address, but from somewhere I'd lived twenty years earlier, my ancient phone number and my date of birth but not the same medications, medical history or eye test results. The optician was convinced there must be someone living there now with the same name and DOB as me, which I thought highly unlikely. It seemed blindingly obvious to me that Boots had somehow merged two patient records into one. Not used Boots opticians since, wasn't impressed with their service either.

When I lived in the UK I regularly got letters about somebody's fertility treatment - who had the same Initial and Surname as me but an entirety opposite set of baby making bits.

I was slightly tempted to turn up to one of the appointments

Boots, when I last used them a long tme ago, seemed to build their business using locums and short term staff.

I got a couple of Boots opticians letters for someone else sent to me a few years ago. I've never been to Boots opticians, and I know all the owners of my house going back to 1983 and it wasn't any of them, so maybe Boots are just a bit rubbish.

.

...that WMP have performed this particular trick. My dad was arrested once, on Easter weekend in or around 2005.

The cops had nabbed someone in Staines for something or other, took the guy's name, DoB and address and let him go. Come his day in court, he didn't show up. The address he'd given turned out to be false. So they looked up the name and DoB in the Dept of Work & Pensions database (which they shouldn't have done, and ignoring that he'd lied once already) and came up with my dad. Then issued a warrant for his arrest. Because they'd knocked on my dad's door on Raster weekend, they were going to hold him until the next working day (tues) because "he'd already skipped bail once".

Eventually, the duty sargeant released him on common sense grounds, but advised he don't leave town for a few days.

Ironically, the police in Staines had a photo of their actual suspect, but never thought to send it with the warrant.

An absolute shit-show, start to finish

I'm assuming Raster weekend wasn't a politically incorrect 80s term for the Notting Hill carnival?

No, it's a little-celebrated public holiday in the UK in recognition of some poor tit with poor mobile phone typing skills.

Co-incidentally, it takes place over Easter.

On Sunday 25th February Foden's Band became Northern Brass Band Champions.

Just the day that Facebook decided that "Fodens" should be autocorrected to "Fuck".

Fixed the next day!

Clearly they need access to more personal data, location, habits and behavior patterns to prevent cases like this going forward. Maybe Meta or Alphabet can offer them some nice data sets at a friendship rate that police can then use to accurately identify individuals, or whatever else they happen to consider doing with this information.

Or put a microchip in each person's neck.

That's why we need ID cards - to protect the children

it should "maintain relevant records of its processing activities and take steps to improve governance measures"

Interestingly. these recommendations and the relevant provisions of the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill are at odds, in that, by paring down the record keeping requirement, the Bill aims to minimise the "red tape" associated with detailed record keeping inherited from the GDPR.

See: https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/01/uk_gov_generative_ai_plan/

"The UK government will trial large language models to help ministers analyze and draft documents as part of a push to overhaul public services using AI.

In a speech on Thursday, deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden called the technology a potential "silver bullet" to reduce the burden of routine admin tasks and make civil servants more productive.

...

More worryingly, perhaps, is Dowden’s idea of crime-prevention algorithms that could "direct police to where they are most needed" and "spot patterns of criminality to discover culprits quicker than ever.""

God help us all.

I would suggest they start with Westminster and the House of Commons.

> In a speech on Thursday, deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden called the technology a potential "silver bullet" to reduce the burden of routine admin tasks and make civil servants more productive.

I'm going to put this as politely as I can: what a fucking idiot.

"thankfully these data errors are incredibly infrequent."

Unless your the one getting your liberty infringed by the state who make it incredibly hard to rectify a fault in their data processing especially when they deliberately hide the data they hold on you from you.

Another data catastrophe that occurs now and then all over the world is if someone is accidentally or maliciously declared dead and the automatic data updates that follow... closure of bank accounts, cancellation of pension, benefits, credit rating, driver's licence, passport etc. Most organisations lack facilities or procedures to make someone "undead" causing considerable suffering to those affected while the bureaucrats just keep repeating "the computer says No".

There are, in this year of our Lord 2024, IT systems keyed simply on first initial and last name. I know this because my wife happens to have the same first initial I do, and we've both gotten numerous official phone calls and letters meant for each other.

I've been summoned to go for flu / covid jabs or random doctor's appointments only to find the appointments were for my wife, the surgery putting my phone number onto her record. To reinforce the confusion, text messages never state who they are intended for.